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Andrew Wilson

It’s been a while since the last post. A lot has happened between now and then and I’d like to take this opportunity to share what we’ve been up to. Understandably, after our successful crowdfunding campaign in August we took a “break” in September to take stock of everything that had happened. If you’re not already familiar with the details:

Our first weekend in August took Vera and I to Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, as well as Sam Mitchel’s old ranch in Edwards CO. For that trip we were in the awesome company of Dr. Henry Beker, his colleague Linda Davies, and our good friend Amy Honan from Western States Colorado University. Here’s the post of that trip for deets.

The second weekend was the CMS Fair with Michael Kuo. Post1. Post2. It was also the week we implemented a new protocol for processing mushrooms.

The last weekend of August I went to Red River, NM to visit and mingle with the New Mexico Mycological Society at their annual foray.

In September we started to tackle our specimens gathered from August. We did this by implementing a new protocol that I’ll discuss in a bit more detail in another blog. We also did a few extra forays, but perhaps the most memorable was the filming I did with Ed and Ikuko Lubow for the PBS show Urban Conversion. Whether or not we produced anything worth putting on television we’ll all have to wait until April when the new season comes out. That being said, I think we all had a great time collecting and talking about the importance of fungi.

A form of black truffle (probably Tuber aestivum) thinly sliced with a form of matsutake (probably Tricholoma magnivelare) with pine nuts and drizzled with a balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Accompanied with a sweet desert wine like a port. I’ll have to get Micheal from Cafe Marie-Jeanne, Chicago, to clarify for me.

October turned into another busy month of mycology and travel. The first weekend of the month I made my annual pilgrimage to Chicago to visit with friends and to take part in the festive trek around Chicago’s many neighborhoods, AKA the Chicago Marathon. One nice visit was to my friend Michael Simmons’ restaurant Cafe Marie-Jeanne. It’s relevant given the fungal inspired charcuterie plate we had there. [SHOUT OUT TO MIKE!]I also was able to make a visit my old home, the Chicago Botanic Garden and sit down with Greg Mueller to chat about project ideas.

After Chicago I headed to Salem Oregon for the North American Mycological Association annual foray. This year was my first as the official Voucher Coordinator. The experience turned out well. Largely thanks to an excellent vouchering crew. The Voucher Committee is lead by Voucher Chair Patrick Leacock, myself, then Wyatt Gasswick, and Bruch Reed. Along for the experience was a great group of student assistants that included Stephen Russel (Purdue University, and North American Mycoflora Project), Christin Swearingen (U. Alaska – Fairbanks), Elise O’Brien (Lane Community College, Eugene OR), Chance Noffsinger (Montana State University), and not least, former CBG alumnus Nik Desai who conveniently resides in Portland.

David Hibbett’s “Big Tree” made an appearance.

Staging area for vouchering collections

With these folks, and the excellent contributions of the NAMA foray participants, we were able to make upwards of 330 collections, with a number of lichen species that had yet to be added to the total. All told we expect there to be over 350 collections – and nearly as many species – during an event that was supposedly held too early in the season. But I guess that’s what the Pacific Northwest is like for mushroom hunting. A “slow” year here would be considered a boon nearly anywhere else on the continent.

Voucher Assistant Elise O’Brien helps a NAMA member recall important voucher information from the foray while other participants diligently fill out their specimen labels.

Now that we’re back, more or less, we’ve been accessioning this year’s collections using new accessioning protocols. I’ve also been courting our volunteers and students to contribute to this blog. Next month I hope to highlight some of the new protocols and perhaps introduce a schedule of topics you’ll be seeing in the future.

With this, I’ll wish you a Happy Thanksgiving chocked full of mushroom infused stuffing and gravy! Cheers…

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We hit our fundraising goal on Experiment.com. BUT!!! We still have about 1.5 days before the clock runs out at midnight on August 31st. As is mentioned on our crowdfunding page, the $5000 we intended to raise would cover approximately 20-25% of our 5-year goal to sequence 1000 species of macrofungi from the Southern Rockies. Any money we get in excess of this will add opportunity and flexibility towards this 5-year goal. And note that this 1000 species is only about half of the known diversity in the Southern Rockies, much less than that of the total possible diversity. So regardless, there’s still a long way to go.

Apart from DNA sequencing, what else can we use the money for? Well a big part of this project is to study the morphology of these organisms. The DNA sequence data should be considered a roadmap of sorts. A metaphorical bread crumb trail that leads us to a better interpretation of what the different mushroom species are. However, it’s better for everyone involved if we could provide field guides and tools that allow people to identify different species directly from their morphology. For this we will need to examine many collections from macro- AND micromorphological perspectives.

So, additional funding will allow us to purchase tackle boxes, and other collecting gear. We will also upgrade our tools for microscopy (finer forceps, additional cover slips, reagents to test reactions on mushrooms, etc.). And as we grow the collections, we will need more bin and specimen boxes to appropriately catalog and store the fungi.

Also, the money from crowdfunding will free up funds from our endowments, allowing us more opportunities to bring in visiting scientists who have expertise in fungi relevant to the Southern Rockies. And while this crowdfunding campaign will come to a close, we will still be accepting donations from people wanting to support the Project. However, we will mostly be focusing our energies in acquiring additional funding through grants that will support summer internships, as well as collecting and producing DNA sequence data.

So in the upcoming months, we’ll be sorting and identifying the collections and figuring out the next steps for the Project. Check back periodically to see what’s going on.

Ikuko with a Laccaria with an exceptionally long stipe. We’re toying with the idea that it’s L.longipes but this species is from bogs in upstate Wisconsin/upper peninsula Michigan. DNA sequencing will help us sort it out.

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The Telluride Mushroom Festival is a destination for both the grounded, and more ethereal mushroom enthusiast. While it has a history of catering to the latter, one thing that is true about the festival is that everyone in attendance is united by their affection for these organisms.

If you’ve spent any time exploring this website, you may have come across our About page. Telluride is located in the Southwestern portion of Colorado, and the map provided on the above page demonstrates that we have a lot of work to do to better represent the mushroom diversity in this part of the state. This makes the Telluride Mushroom Festival a great opportunity for us, and also a great opportunity to expose the Festival’s community to this project and what we can learn from it.

Along with several other academic mycologists, Andy was invited down to help promote the Colorado Mycoflora Project through the coordination of a voucher program, providing a seminar on the project, and sitting down on a discussion panel on the theme of, “Mycology in the Molecular Biology Era … For Beginners and Citizen Scientists“. Every event was well attended and well received. There seemed to be a lot of enthusiasm for the Project, as well as curiosity in the what, why, and how of the approach to studying fungal biodiversity.

Several speakers gave excellent talks about the world of mycological research. Our own Rick Levy gave a great talk on the importance of making scientifically relevant mushroom collections. Jeff Ravage gave a talk on his mycoremediation project. Poor guy had to compete for attention against Paul Stametes who was also giving a lecture at that time, but he got a decent turnout regardless. Cathie Aime gave two talks. The first one captivated the audience with stories of her mushroom adventures in the wilderness of Guyana. The second seminar focused on the fascinating biology of the rust fungi. And perhaps the most spectacular academic lecture I’ve ever witnessed was given by David Hibbett, who for his talk channeled the ghost of Theophrastus, the “father of botany”. In his talk he regaled us with mycology’s origins as an aspect of botany. He also demonstrated that we are all somewhat guilty of “ladder thinking” when we attempt to evaluate and categorize different forms of life. David gave a second seminar that was equally well received, the subject of which fed into a demonstration he gave showing how different phenotypic forms of fungi are distributed through the fungal tree of life.

As for the vouchering program that the Colorado Mycoflora Project intended to implement at Telluride, this remains a work in progress. For one, our (=my) idea of implementing a protocol much like we had at the CMS Fair the week prior, will not really work well in this environment. We’ll likely need to resort to a more traditional format where individuals go out on individual forays and either recruit other festival attendees, sympathetic to our efforts, or provide focused forays with the intent to make collections for the Project. Another issue was how dry Telluride was for the Festival. The ID tent had mostly bare tables. While people were able to make collections on their forays, many of the specimens were in poor shape. It was also challenging to get the necessary collection information from those that dropped off their specimens. This is likely a communication issue that we can do better on, and something we plan to aggressively address for future forays and festivals. Regardless, we were able to return to DBG with well over 60 collections, with the count still climbing.

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Whew! Whatta weekend. This year’s Colorado Mycological Society fair saw a record crowd. Over 2200 people walked through the doors of Mitchell Hall at Denver Botanic Gardens. While by all external measures indicating this year to be a dry year, we still managed to collect the metadata of: collector ID, date, location, and, to some degree, habitat and lat/long coordinates, for over 550 collections of macrofungi in two days.

I have to give a big thanks to our fair identifier, Dr. Michael Kuo. That man was a machine, providing identifications for 286 specimens. This production took place from 1 pm on Saturday until late into the evening, and continued on early Sunday until he had to leave around 2pm to catch his flight.

The preliminary count stands at 141 species of macrofungi that came through the fair. We stress this number as ‘preliminary’ because it includes all of the specimens identified as ‘sp.’, which were counted only once per genus, and for several genera there were many specimens identified only to ‘sp.’. This include Cortinarius and Russula, each having 26 specimens identified as ‘sp.’, and genera such as Inocybe and Galerina, which had 7 and 6 respectively.

The ‘star’ of the fair (perhaps ignominiously) was a rather putrid species of Gautieria which produce these intense phenolic compounds that are reminiscent of some strong petroleum like chemical, or a rather pungent cheese. In describing this fungus to the public, and it’s design to attract rodents as vectors of spore dispersal, I’d say I came across equal numbers of people who found the smell either pleasant or disgusting.

In the end, we collected a subset of all of these specimens for vouchering in the Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi. While we would love to have captured more of the diversity, a combination of rotting specimens, insufficient quality of the collection (too few representatives), and need for better coordination prevented us from capturing a better cross section of what came through the fair. However, in terms of documenting the meta data for each of the specimens, I think our efforts were a great success. I’m already looking forward to next year to up our game even more!

Acknowledgements: A big thank you to our guest fair identifier, Dr. Michael Kuo. You sir set a standard that is hard to beat! Big ups to fellow Colorado Mycoflora Project comrade, Amy Honan who came all the way over from Crested Butte to help out at the fair. To the Colorado Mycological Society for putting on yet another smashing event. Also grateful for the amazing help of Trina Wilson, Michael McKibben, Danila Romanov, Ed and Ikuko Lubow, Linda Plessinger, Ellen Jacobson, and Eddie Elzarian.

The Gautieria that ‘funked’ up the herbarium with its petroleum/cheesy odor. Fortunately only a few of us were exposed to its funk when fresh. Dried it was still odorous, but much more tolerable.

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As I write this on Saturday, August 11th, were in the midst of setting up for the Colorado Mycological Society’s Mushroom Fair at Denver Botanic Gardens. This year the CMS has brought in Dr Michael Kuo of Mushroomexpert.com as the Fair’s resident identifier.

This year’s Fair is particularly exciting because it’s the first year that we’re promoting the Colorado Mycoflora Project. Hopefully we’ll be able to find new donors for our crowdfunding efforts. We’re also giving a trial run to a new method of processing specimens. With the ability to use barcodes and a scanner, we’re working to digitize all of the metadata for every specimen that enters the Fair. While we won’t accession every collection into the herbarium, this technique should provide us with invaluable collections level data for the overall Colorado Mycoflora Project.

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Plants are at the pinnacle of terrestrial life and the energy they harness from sunlight flows down to every other land-dwelling organism on the planet. What is often taken for granted is that plants, as we know them, would not exist without fungi. Fungi are essential to ecosystem health. They are critical symbionts that help plants grow. They help to such an extent that they make trees possible. Think about that. Trees would not be able to achieve the sizes they do without essential nutrients supplied to them by their fungal partners. In addition, the massive amounts of structural tissue that plants produce in the form of cellulose cannot be metabolized by the vast majority of organisms. Fungi, on the other hand, are the planet’s most efficient decomposers of plant-based carbohydrate, converting an otherwise indigestible molecule into nutritious fungal matter, and providing critical resources for other organisms in the ecosystem’s food web.

The Colorado Mycoflora Project is a regional contributor to the North American Mycoflora Project. The more than 2,300 species of Colorado macrofungi accessioned in the Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi represents a small fraction of the diversity likely found in the Southern Rockies. Through greater regional sampling and the use of DNA sequence data this project will provide knowledge and educational opportunities about the diversity of macrofungi of the Southern Rocky Mountains.